To love him...meant DEATH!

Strikingly directed and designed, evocatively scored and written story of a crazed artist who is compelled to murder his models after he has finished painting them, with a fine performance by John Carradine, in a role he has always ranked among his best. The stylized sets; ironically lifting romantic music; and, above all, Ulmer's ful, subtly heightened, semiabstract direction, all combine to make an unusually engrossing, poetic, modest little film, with a unique charm and sadness. Bluebeard has that sort of magic, all the more astonishing when you consider the profoundly limiting conditions under which the film was achieved.